Architecture and Public Policy

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CIS explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to those changes. This work has lead us to analyze the issue of network neutrality, perhaps the Internet's most debated policy issue, which concerns Internet user's ability to access the content and software of their choice without interference from network providers.

Professor of Law and Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Barbara van Schewick is a Professor of Law and Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering in Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering, and a leading expert on net neutrality.

Paddy Leerssen was the Open Internet Fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society in 2017-2018. AT CIS, he worked on digital media and communications law in general, and net neutrality policy in particular. He is now a PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam, where his dissertation focuses on the impacts of algorithmic content recommendations on the governance of media pluralism. Paddy holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar, an LL.M. from the University of Amsterdam, and an LL.B. from Maastricht University.

Marvin Ammori is a leading First Amendment lawyer and Internet policy expert. He was instrumental to the adoption of network neutrality rules in the US and abroad–having been perhaps the nation’s leading legal advocate advancing network neutrality–and also instrumental to the defeat of the SOPA and PIPA copyright/censorship bills.

Emily Baxter is a research associate for Women's Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress, focusing on women's and families' economic security, women's leadership, and work-family balance. She previously worked as the special assistant for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center. In the fall of 2012, Emily was a field organizer for President Obama’s re-election campaign near her hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania.

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The Canadian Supreme Court this morning issued its long-awaited ruling in Equustek. The court upheld an order compelling Google to remove search results for specified websites, not just in Canada, but everywhere in the world.

Today, the Stanford Law Review published my very first single-authored publication, “Expanding the Periphery and Threatening the Core: The Ascendant Libertarian Speech Tradition.” This article contributes to the legal scholarly literature about the rise in the mid-to-late twentieth century

The EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect in the spring of 2018, bringing with it a newly codified version of the “Right to Be Forgotten” (RTBF). Depending how the new law is interpreted, this right could prove broader than the “right to be de-listed” established in 2014’s Google Spain case. It could put even more decisions about the balance between privacy and free expression in the hands of private Internet platforms like Google.

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This week, the House will vote on H.R. 1644, introduced by Rep. Mike Doyle, which would reinstate the net neutrality protections of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order as of January 19, 2017. H.R. 1096, a competing measure introduced by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, purports to restore the Open Internet Order’s rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, as well as the transparency rule.

Both bills have been touted as means to restore comprehensive net neutrality protections for all Americans.

In the leadup to the FCC's historic vote in December 2017 to repeal all net neutrality protections, 22 million comments were filed to the agency.

But unfortunately, millions of those comments were fake. Some of the fake comment were part of sophisticated campaigns that filed fake comments using the names of real people - including journalists, Senators and dead people.

Reconciling Copyright with Cumulative Creativity: The Third Paradigm examines the long history of creativity, from cave art to digital remix, in order to demonstrate a consistent disparity between the traditional cumulative mechanics of creativity and modern copyright policies.

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Comcast Corp. v. FCC is a 2010 United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia case holding that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does not have ancillary jurisdiction over Comcast’s Internet service under the language of the Communications Act of 1934. In so holding, the Court vacated a 2008 order issued by the FCC that asserted jurisdiction over Comcast’s network management polices and censured Comcast from interfering with its subscribers' use of peer-to-peer software.

In 2005, on the same day the FCC re-classified DSL service and effectively reduced the regulatory obligations of DSL providers, the FCC announced its unanimous view that consumers are entitled to certain rights and expectations with respect to their broadband service, including the right to:

A federal appeals court in D.C. earlier this week threw up a roadblock to the Federal Communications Commission’s plans for the future of the Internet in America. The details of the case were relatively straight-forward: Comcast was caught interfering with traffic by customers using the cumbersome file-sharing application BitTorrent, flouting a 2005 FCC Internet policy stating that Web users are entitled to access the content and applications of their choice.

Cultural Events Board is proud to announce that Valarie Kaur will be the first out-of-state Sikh American to come speak to our campus regarding hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim American following 9/11.

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"Netflix accounts for about a third of peak-period broadband traffic. So what does that mean for the net neutrality debate? "I don't think it matters," says Barbara van Schewick, faculty director of the Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School, "because under a good network neutrality regime, people pay for the bandwidth they use and it doesn't really matter where it comes from.""

CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Profs. Laura Roselle of Elon University and Ben O’Loughlin of Royal Holloway, University of London, co-authors of Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order.